An Ethics of Reading: Adorno, Levinas, and Irigaray

by Michelle Boulous Walker

I venture to suggest that our age threatens one day to appear in the history of human culture
as marked by the most dramatic and difficult trial of all, the discovery of and training in the
meaning of the "simplest" acts of existence: seeing, listening, speaking, reading.1

Posing the Question: What is it to Read?

In his now notorious reading of Das Kapital, Louis Althusser-following what he sees to be
Marx's lead-asks "what is it to read"?"2 It is Althusser's question that frames the concerns of
this essay. Now, we may think of this as an innocent question, but in this same piece Althusser
warns us that any philosophical reading must be distinguished from an innocent reading; "as
there is no such thing as an innocent reading," he writes, "we must say what reading we are
guilty of (14). It is not my concern, here, to follow the contours of the guilty reading that
Althusser goes on to elaborate,3 I merely suggest that his question-read in a certain way-
makes it possible to explore some preliminary thoughts concerning the ethics of how we, as
philosophers, read. I want to say-with Althusser-that there is indeed no innocent reading, and
by this I mean that how we read, how we approach and respond to a text, is more than
casually significant. There is a tendency for philosophers-of certain persuasions-to think of
reading as at best a kind of neutral activity, and it is perhaps toward this kind of attitude that
my preliminary comments are addressed.4

Emmanuel Levinas's work on the ethical response to the other serves as a way of broadening
out this question of how we read, towards an elaboration of reading in ethical terms.5 I think
that his nuanced accounts of what philosophy is and what it does helps us to think about what
happens-in a traditional or conventional sense-when it reads.6 Now, in the process of
developing his account of ethical responsibility and obligation, Levinas uncovers the ways
philosophy silently reduces all that it "reads" back to its own categories or understandings. For
example, he suggests that in the production of philosophical knowledge there appears:

the notion of an intellectual activity or of a reasoning will-a way of doing something which
consists precisely of thinking through knowing, of seizing something and making it one's own,
of reducing to presence and representing the difference of being, an activity which
appropriates and grasps the otherness of the known. A certain grasp: as an entity, being
becomes the characteristic property of thought, as it is grasped by it and becomes known.
Knowledge as perception, concept, comprehension, refers back to an act of grasping. The
metaphor should be taken literally: even before any technical application of knowledge, it
expresses the principle rather than the result of the future technological and industrial order
of which every civilization bears at least the seed. The immanence of the known to the act of
knowing is already the embodiment of seizure. This is not something applied like a form of
magic to the 'impotent spirituality' of thinking, nor is it the guarantee of certain psycho-
physiological conditions, but rather belongs to that unit of knowledge in which Auffassen
(understanding) is also, and always has been, a Fassen (gripping). The mode of thought known
as knowledge involve's man's concrete existence in the world he inhabits, in which he moves
and works and possesses.7

Philosophy's mode of knowing-and this implicates the way it reads-is to take the world,
experience or the other in to itself in such a way that no trace or residue is left to testify to an
alien otherness: "Knowledge is representation, a return to presence, and nothing may remain
other to it" (77). Indeed, Simon Critchley echoes this well when he writes: "Philosophy is
defined by Levinas as that alchemy whereby the Other is transmuted into the Same, an
alchemy that is performed with the philosopher's stone of the knowing ego."8 Philosophy's
mode of reading, in its most extreme (or pure?) form, is, then, to obliterate the absolute
alterity of the other. It is to reduce the other, through the might of conceptual or logical force,
to what can already be understood. And the motivation for this kind of reading? "the
assurance that no otherness will hinder or prevent the Same and that each sortie into alterity
will return to self bearing the prize of absolute comprehension."9 In its quest for absolute
comprehension, philosophy overshadows the other and I like to think of the reading that
accompanies this gesture as a kind of stand-over technique. Philosophy intimidates its other
into a certain conformity with its own knowledge, demanding that it deliver up its goods in
such a way that this knowledge is then confirmed. "For Levinas, the ontological event which
defines and distinguishes the entire philosophical tradition from Parmenides to Heidegger,
consists in suppressing all forms of otherness [L'Autrui-the singular other] and transmuting
alterity into the Same (le Même). Philosophy is the assimilation of the other into the Same,
where the other's otherness is assimilated and digested like food and drink."10

The kind of philosophical reading that Levinas uncovers here arguably bears something in
common with Freud's remarks about the technical process of secondary revision in the dream
work. Freud claims that the absolute otherness-although this is not his exact term-of the
unconscious is forcefully reduced back to the logical structures and meanings of rational
thought. He characterizes secondary revision in intentional terms, arguing that its purpose is to
clean up the messy incoherence that, if left intact, challenges the primacy of rational thought.

The thing that distinguishes and at the same time reveals this part of the dream-work is its
purpose. This function behaves in the manner which the poet maliciously ascribes to
philosophers: it fills up the gaps in dream-structure with shreds and patches. As a result of its
efforts, the dream loses its appearance of absurdity and disconnectedness and approximates
to the model of an intelligible experience.11

Secondary revision is thus likened to the "shreds and patches"12 that the philosopher employs
in order to fabricate a rational meaning. Freud alludes, here, albeit playfully and somewhat
indirectly, to the force of philosophical reading-the sense in which the philosopher obliterates
the otherness of what confronts "him" in "his" attempt to impose clarity and meaning.13 In a
not dissimilar fashion, Levinas wants to show how philosophy's meanings are-like Freud's
manifest dream-fabricated events. And in doing so, he forces us to confront-in ethical terms-
the effects of this fabrication. While meaning may emerge from the work (secondary revision?)
that philosophy does, it is, Levinas contends, at the expense of the otherness philosophy hopes
to domesticate. At best we might say that philosophy misses the other in its ardor to found
truth. At worst, and this is certainly Levinas's point, we have to face the fact that philosophy
obliterates the very alterity of the other, what makes it distinct in the first place.

Now, how might we understand this in terms of our original question? What is it to read? If
Levinas is correct in his depiction of the dominant tradition of Western philosophy,14 then it
would seem that the manner in which we read is to stand over, to intimidate, ultimately to
obliterate. If this is the case then we might-with Levinas-go on to ask another question: what
might it be to read otherwise? How might philosophy read? And the related questions: What
other ways are there to read? And what might mark such other readings as ethical?

Here, again, Levinas offers us a way of posing these questions, at least in the sense that he
distinguishes between a dominant philosophical approach that imagines that it can finalize and
complete a topic (le Dit -the Said) and another philosophical response, one that touches upon
a theme in such a way as to leave the terrain of understanding both open and open-ended (le
Dire-the Saying).15 This philosophical response-what we might call Levinas's "philosophy of
saying" or "ethical saying"-involves an attitude of respect that recognizes the openness of
discourse already "there" beneath any attempts to close it. Here Levinas gestures toward the
possibility of a philosophical response that approaches its other so as to encounter and engage
rather than to obliterate or distort. One that reorients philosophy toward the other (Levinas
refers to such an encounter as theface-to-face), not over the other. It is, according to Steven G.
Smith, "conceived as a pure surplus over evidence, theme, and logic."16 But what might such a
response entail? Levinas alludes to this in the following passage, taken from Otherwise Than
Being or Beyond Essence:

This passivity of passivity and this dedication to the Other, this sincerity, is Saying-not as a
communication of something Said, which would be immediately recovered and absorbed or
extinguished in the Said, but Saying holding its opening open, without excuse, without evasion
or alibi, giving itself without saying anything of the Said-"Saying" saying "saying itself (Dire
disant le dire meme), without thematizing it, but still expositing it.17

Saying involves the risk of exposure to the other that is, Levinas contends, the indication of
sincerity. And this is ethics. It is an attitude of openness or goodness that occurs despite
oneself-"the commitment of an approach, the one for the other."18 Over and above a
philosophical speech that presents itself as finished and complete, "impervious to critique,"
Levinas's saying offers "the sort of talk that enters into genuine sociality by opening itself to
the critique and justification of others."19 It occupies, as Smith notes, "a realm of
nontheoretical yet philosophical argument,"20 one that speaks "the soft necessity of the
noncoercive 'sweet' reason studied by rhetoricians."21 It avoids and thus puts into question
the philosophical tradition that accords greater dignity to "the hard necessity of coercive logic
or evidence, according to which the structure of thought or being makes it impossible to
believe otherwise than has been demonstrated."22

Levinas's work on the ethics of response and responsibility, and the saying this implies, can, as
Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley have pointed out, be thought alongside questions of
reading. In fact, they suggest that an appropriate response to his work might involve making
connections with what they refer to as "the ethical structure of reading."23 While I would
want to think of this more in terms of "an" ethical structure of reading (so as not to close the
question in such definite terms), I am wholly convinced by the manner in which they bring
Levinas's concerns to bear on questions of reading. Here, reading is thought of in terms of the
(possible) construction of an ethical space or encounter.

Levinas finds in the face of the Other (autrui) a point of irreducible alterity which resists the
philosophical logos. The self finds itself put in question by and obliged to respond to the Other.
The obligation to respond amounts to a responsibility that cannot be evaded, but that has
been ignored or dissimulated within the philosophical tradition. Do such considerations apply
beyond the face-to-face, understood empirically, to the relation a reader might have with a
text? Does the activity of reading-often defined as a process of comprehension, even of
digestion-itself betray the ethical space which is so carefully broached in Levinas's work? Or
does Levinas's reinscription of the face-to-face in what he calls "Saying" (le Dire), which he
himself in Otherwise than Being and elsewhere applies to written works as well as direct
encounters, not suggest the possibility of a Levinasian hermeneutics? Such a hermeneutics
would perhaps be defined by its readiness for re-reading because it would have no interest in
distilling the content of a text into a "said," an encapsulation of its meaning, so that one could
be satisfied that one had finished reading.24

While Bernasconi and Critchley remain acutely aware of the danger of "betraying" Levinas by
illegitimately reducing his empirically based ethical concerns to the domain of reading, they
do, I think, provide us with a compelling way to approach the question-or rather questions-of
reading. What resonates, for me, is the priority they seem to place on a Levinasian
hermeneutics of proximity, one "defined by its readiness for re-reading"-a readiness that has
no interest to distill or complete a text.23 Now, it is this readiness for rereading that I wish to
pursue and I shall do so via a reading of one of Levinas's most challenging readers, Luce
Irigaray. Before I do, though, I wish to make a few brief observations concerning the question
of an openended approach to philosophy.

An Open-Ended Philosophy

I find the idea of an open-ended philosophy compelling, and it is interesting to note that this
notion finds expression in the work of a philosopher whose work is seemingly distant from
Levinas's: Theodor W. Adorno. When I read Adorno's "The Essay as Form" I read it as a gesture
toward the kind of open-ended philosophy that Levinas calls into being. This is by no means to
suggest that Levinas and Adorno share the same project and that their work can be reduced
one to other, but rather that by reading Adorno alongside Levinas we open possibilities-
possibilities that hint toward a future philosophy.26

In "The Essay as Form" (1958) Adorno traces the intricate relation of form to content and in so
doing champions a new approach to writing philosophy. Now I think what Adorno has to say
about writing here has direct implications for reading as well. In many senses this work is one
of Adorno's responses to the longstanding philosophical traditions and strictures passed down
from Descartes and others. Indeed, in the middle of the essay he addresses the Descartes of
the Discourse on Method saying that "The essay gently defies the ideals of clara et distincta
perceptio and of absolute certainty. On the whole it could be interpreted as a protest against
the four rules that Descartes' Discourse on Method sets up at the beginning of modern
Western science and its theory."27 The rule-bound tradition that Adorno resists here is, I think,
a good point of focus as it helps us to make more sense of what it is that Levinas works to
undo. This approach to philosophy sees itself as an exhaustive quest, a style of thinking,
reading and writing that aims to say all that can possibly be said in such a way as to-and these
are Descartes' words-"be assured that nothing [is] omitted."28

Adorno has what some might consider to be a very particular idea of the essay.29 What is
essential, though, is his contention that the essay, above all, resists the demand for
completeness.30 In a sense, too, the essay resists its own definition. It is, perhaps, a writing in
search of identity-a search that Adorno would consider never to be fulfilled. "The essay ... does
not permit its domain to be prescribed ... it says what is at issue and stops where it feels itself
complete-not where nothing is left to say. Therefore it is classed among the oddities. Its
concepts are neither deduced from any first principle nor do they come full circle and arrive at
a final principle" (93). While it borrows liberally from art, Adorno claims that the essay
distinguishes itself from the aesthetic domain through its conceptual character. But this
conceptuality has more in common with the fragmentary than any totality, largely because it
refuses to define its concepts.31 The essay is

radically un-radical in refraining from any reduction to a principle, in accentuating the

fragmentary,32the partial rather than the total. . . . The essay does not obey the rules of the
game of organized science and theory that, following Spinoza's principle. the order of things is
identical with that of ideas. Since the airtight order of concepts is not identical with existence,
the essay does not strive for closed, deductive or inductive, construction. It revolts above all
against the doctrine-deeply rooted since Plato-that the changing and ephemeral is unworthy
of philosophy; against that ancient injustice toward the transitory, by which it is once more
anathematized, conceptually. The essay shys [sic] away from the violence of dogma, from the
notion that the result of abstraction, the temporally invariable concept indifferent to the
individual phenomenon grasped by it, deserves ontological dignity. (98)

Adorno overturns conventional criticisms of the essay-that it is fragmentary and random-by

celebrating the manner in which these characteristics release thought from the strictures of
order and linearity. He claims that thought does not move or progress in one clearly defined
direction, but rather that it weaves or is woven from the essay's very textured approach.

In the essay, concepts do not build a continuum of operations, thought does not advance in a
single direction, rather the aspects of the argument interweave as in a carpet. The fruitfulness
of the thoughts depends on the density of this texture. Actually, the thinker does not think, but
rather transforms himself into an arena of intellectual experience, without simplifying it. While
even traditional thought draws its impulses from such experience, such thought by its form
eliminates the remembrance of these impulses. The essay, on the other hand, takes them as
its model, without simply imitating them as reflected form; it mediates them through its own
conceptual organization; it proceeds, so to speak, methodically unmethodically. (101)

Because of its experimental and open nature the essay is without security, "it must pay for its
affinity with open intellectual experience by the lack of security, a lack which the norm of
established thought fears like death" (101). And this insecurity is, at least in part, presumed in
Adorno's notion of the configuration. Here the structure, hierarchy and organization of the
traditional philosophical mode is challenged by the essay's open weave; "In the essay
discreetly separated elements enter into a readable context; it erects no scaffolding, no
edifice. Through their own movement the elements crystallize into a configuration" (102). The
configuration marks the work of the essay, or we might even say of thought. The insecurity
that is constitutive of the essay and its configuration is, Adorno says, melded to a kind of guilt-
a guilt that arises from the essay's refusal to conclude, to speak definitively.34 Might we think
of this refusal, then, as the essay's perpetual readiness to re-read? Adorno's insistence on the
open-ended nature of the essay points, I think, in this direction. There is something about the
essay-as Adorno presents it-that opens itself to the kind of otherness that I have spoken of in
relation to Levinas. Indeed, Adorno claims that

the object of the essay is the new as something genuinely new, as something not translatable
back into the staleness of already existing forms. By reflecting the object without doing
violence to it, the essay silently laments the fact that truth has betrayed happiness and thus
itself; this lament incites the rage against the essay.... [The essay's] transitions disavow rigid
deduction in the interest of establishing internal crossconnections, something for which
discursive logic has no use. (108-09)

We might say that the essay allows the other to be, without violently appropriating or reducing
it back to systematic conceptual terms. The essay does not "know" the other-in any rigorous or
narrowly defined philosophical sense. Rather, it engages the other establishing internal cross-
connections. "It co-ordinates elements, rather than subordinating them" (109). Writing in
1958, however, Adorno cautions that the essay's time is uncertain:

The relevance of the essay is that of anachronism. The hour is more unfavorable to it than
ever. It is being crushed between an organized science, on one side, in which everyone
presumes to control everyone and everything else, and which excludes, with the
sanctimonious praise of 'intuitive' or 'stimulating', anything that does not conform to the
status quo; and on the other side, by a philosophy that makes do with the empty and abstract
residues left aside by the scientific apparatus, residues which then become, for philosophy, the
object of seconddegree operations. The essay, however, has to do with that which is blind in
its objects. Conceptually it wants to blow open what cannot be absorbed by concepts, or what,
through contradictions in which concepts entangle themselves, betrays the fact that the
network of their objectivity is a purely subjective rigging. . . . Therefore the law of the
innermost form of the essay is heresy. By transgressing the orthodoxy of thought, something
becomes visible in the object which it is orthodoxy's secret purpose to keep invisible. (110)

According to Adorno, it is precisely the essay's unfashionable or untimely nature that lends it
its relevance. In an age of increasing technocracy our need for the essay and its resistance is
ever more crucial. The essay resists thought's reduction to what Adorno elsewhere refers to as
an instrumental rationality.35 The law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy and
perhaps this heresy lies (paradoxically) in the attitude of respect that the essay demonstrates
toward its other. By refusing to know the other, to totalize, distill, summarize or assimilate the
other to its own form, the essay offers us a future philosophy-one that holds out the hope for
an encounter with the transitory and singular nature of the world. While this encounter clearly
has implications for the ways in which we write philosophy, it is equally, I think, a call for
reading in different ways.
Levinas's call for an ethical response to the other-read alongside Adorno's celebration of the
essay as form-tempts us to return, once again, to our initial question: what is it to read? I think
that the open,36 somewhat tentative nature that emerges from their particular approaches to
and attitudes about philosophy are useful for rethinking the question of how we might read.
Indeed, Levinas's own practice-characterized by Bernasconi and Critchley as a readiness to re-
read-along with Adorno's call for an essayistic writing (and reading) that resists the demands of
a totalizing discourse, offer us motivation for seeking examples of philosophical readings that
hint toward an ethical future in their present forms. Such a reading can, I think, be found in the
work of Luce Irigaray. It is not accidentally that I choose Irigaray as her own carefully crafted
readings-developed now over decades-have been intimately influenced by Levinas's ethical
agenda. To say this is not to reduce, in any simple sense, Irigaray's work to Levinasian themes-
her own critical readings of Levinas would not, in any case, permit this-but rather to
acknowledge the connection between Levinas's thought and her own. Having said this, it is
important to note fundamental differences in their approaches. Briefly put, we might
summarize these as follows. While Levinas is concerned to chart the ethical responsibility that
we face as a result of our asymmetrical relations with the other, Irigaray's ethical relation
charts a reciprocity and love that might be possible between those who recognize and
celebrate sexual difference. Irigaray speaks about the possibility of an amorous exchange,
while Levinas is concerned with the face-to-face encounter. Irigaray's intimate readings of
Levinas's own work offer rich and subtle examples of what we might think of as ethical
readings, and the attitude of critical or engaged respect that she develops here finds a
particular, even singular, expression in her engagement with Plato's great text on love-the
Symposium. Indeed, it is noteworthy that Irigaray's readings of Levinas take the form of
questions posed. The question arguably approaches the other/text in a way that opens out any
reading toward a space of encounter or dialogue. Rather than telling us the (final) truth about
Levinas, Irigaray's questions open out her reading toward this possible encounter.37 Her
reading of Plato takes a similar form in that it is, in part, a series of questions posed to Diotima,
questions which, as we will see, work to keep Irigaray's reading both open and receptive. It is
to this reading, Irigaray's encounter with Diotima, that I now wish to turn as I think that it
offers us one marked by an openness, and a readiness to read and re-read again.

Irigaray's Diotima: Instructress in the Arts of Philosophy, Love and Reading

In "Sorcerer Love"38 Irigaray revisits the source of myriad Western interpretations and
analyses of love-Plato's Symposium.39 Here, she chooses to focus on Diotima whose words are
(faithfully/unfaithfully-we do not know) reported by Socrates in her absence. Irigaray briefly
sets the scene for her encounter with Diotima by hinting at the significance of her absence-her
body and voice-for the tradition of Western thought.40 The reading that Irigaray goes on to
offer is subtle. She carefully teases out the layers of Diotima's "speech," showing how two
(contradictory?) voices emerge. To begin with, Irigaray has something to say about Diotima's
teaching which is, she says, dialectical, though dialectical in a way very different way from
Hegel's. Diotima's dialectical method or approach to doing philosophy emerges from the
manner in which her thought establishes an intermediary space that is not abandoned in a
later movement toward a newly synthesized truth.

Unlike Hegel's, her dialectic does not work by opposition to transform the first term into the
second, in order to arrive at a synthesis of the two. At the very outset, she establishes the
intermediary and she never abandons it as a mere way or means. Her method is not, then, a
propaedeutic of the destruction or destructuration of the two terms in order to establish a
synthesis which is neither one nor the other. She presents, uncovers, unveils the existence of a
third that is already there and that permits progression: from poverty to wealth, from
ignorance to wisdom, from mortality to immortality. For her, this progression always leads to a
greater perfection of and in love. (64)41

From here Irigaray will, significantly, point to how Diotima's word's on love demonstrate that
love and the movement of love is itself precisely this intermediary space. "It is love that leads
to knowledge-both practical and metaphysical. It is love that is both the guide and the way,
above all the mediator" (65).42 Diotima's dialectic is, then, the enactment of this intermediary
space of love-this "held between" (ibid.).4 From Diotima, Irigaray learns the lessons of a
thinking or reading that hovers, one that remains in constant movement or becoming44-never
fixed, never finished, never complete.

The dialectic of Diotima is in four terms, at least: the here, the two poles of the meeting, the
beyond, but a beyond which never abolishes the here. And so on, indefinitely. The mediator is
never abolished in an infallible knowledge. Everything is always in movement, in becoming.
And the mediator of everything is, among other things, or exemplarily, love. Never completed,
always evolving. (65)

Never completed, always evolving. This is to be the gesture of Irigraray's own reading, one that
will take us to engage with Diotima and the complexity, indeed the uncertainty or ambiguity,
of her speech.

According to Irigaray, Diotima's teaching involves a ceaseless questioning of Socrates' own

positions, a questioning that renounces the masterly attitude of positing established or fixed
truths. In so doing, she calls certainty-Socrates' certainty at least-into question. This she does
by suggesting the demonic nature of love, i.e., the sense in which love mediates between the
divine and the mortal, thus negating its status as a God. "Love is a demon-his function is to
transmit to the gods what comes from men and to men what comes from the gods. Like
everything else that is demonic, love is complementary to gods and to men in a such a way as
to join everything with itself (66).43 This demonic nature of love-or Eros-is what places him or
it as intermediary between opposites. Love mediates not only between the Gods and men, but
between poverty and plenty, ignorance and wisdom, ugliness and beauty, and so on.46 And
this is indeed important for it is at this point that Diotima suggests the tie between philosophy
and love. "Wisdom is one of the most beautiful of things, and Love is love of beauty, so it
follows that Love must be a lover of wisdom, and consequently in a state half-way between
wisdom and ignorance."47 Philosophy occupies the intermediary space between wisdom and
ignorance. It is the movement constituting a thought that emerges between these opposites.
And in this, Diotima shows, it is a kind of love. Irigaray interprets this passage so: "love is a
philosopher, love is philosophy. Philosophy is not formal knowledge, fixed, abstracted from all
feeling. It is the search for love, love of beauty, love of wisdom, which is one of the most
beautiful things" (68).48 Now, I shall in due course return to this statement, that love is
philosophy, but for the moment let us return to the progression-the movementùof Irigaray's
reading of Diotima's speech

Irigaray moves on to Diotima's discussion of the engendering in beauty of the body and soul.
She suggests that a certain passage here has never really been understood. When Diotima
says: "The union of a man and woman is, in fact, a generation; this is a thing divine; in a living
creature that is mortal, it is an element of immortality, this fecundity and generation"
(Diotima, cited in Irigaray, 69),49 Irigaray responds by suggesting that Diotima points, however
fleetingly, to "the presence of the immortal in the living mortal" (69), i.e., to the dialectical
relation or intermediate space that passionate love holds. According to Irigaray, Diotima will
momentarily celebrate the ambiguous unity of the meeting between divine and mortal: "All
love would be creation, potentially divine, a path between the condition of the mortal and that
of the immortal. Love is fecund before all procreation. And it has a mediumlike, demonic
fecundity. Assuring everyone, male and female, the immortal becoming of the living.... The aim
of love is to realize the immortality in the mortality between the lovers" (69). What is deeply
significant for Irigaray, at this point in Diotima's speech, is that this momentary celebration of
love as an intermediary or bridge between the divine and the mortal, the physical and the
meta-physical, is cut short by what appears (at least for Irigaray) as a surprising, almost brutal
reduction in her method. When Diotima moves to ground her discourse on love in procreation,
love then loses the demonic quality that she has previously attributed to it. Irigaray ironically
refers to this as the moment at which Diotima's method "miscarries"50 and because the
passage is crucial to her reading, I shall repeat it here:

Diotima's method miscarries here. From here on, she leads love into a schism between mortal
and immortal. Love loses its demonic character. Is this the founding act of the meta-physical?
There will be lovers in body and lovers in soul. But the perpetual passage from mortal to
immortal that lovers confer on one another is put aside. Love loses its divinity, its mediumlike,
alchemical qualities between couples of opposites. The intermediary becomes the child, and
no longer love. Occupying the place of love, the child can no longer be a lover. It is put in the
place of the incessant movement of love. Beloved, no doubt; but how be beloved without
being a lover? And is not love trapped in the beloved, contrary to what Diotima wanted in the
first place? A beloved who is an end is substituted for love between men and women. A
beloved who is a will, even a duty, and a means of attaining immortality. Lovers can neither
attain nor advance that between themselves. That is the weakness of love, for the child as
well. If the couple of lovers cannot care for the place of love like a third term between them,
then they will not remain lovers and they cannot give birth to lovers. Something gets solidified
in space-time with the loss of a vital intermediary milieu and of an accessible, loving,
transcendental. A sort of ideological triangle replaces a perpetual movement, a perpetual
transvaluation, a permanent becoming. Love was the vehicle of this. But, if procreation
becomes its goal, it risks losing its internal motivation, its fecundity 'in itself, its slow and
constant regeneration. (70)51

The fecundity of Diotima's teachings on love (as the intermediary space that communicates
between the divine and the mortal) has been lost. Diotima's method miscarries and this,
Irigaray wonders, may be the founding act of the meta-physical-the falling into two
irreconcilable worlds of body and spirit. Diotima seems lost to Irigaray52 who, nonetheless,
continues to read. And what she reads is that Diotima returns to her "becoming", to her
depiction of love as a perpetual increase that makes no reference to the finality of procreation
or the child. Diotima' s discussion of "the losses caused by age" being "repaired by new
acquisitions of a similar kind" leads her to suggest that this process "enables the mortal to
partake of immortality, physically as well as in other ways."53 And here Irigaray reads a re-
inscription of the demonic nature of love: "we are a 'regrowth' of ourselves, in perpetual
increase. No more quest for immortality through the child. But in us, ceaselessly. Diotima has
returned to a path which admits love as it was defined before she evoked procreation: an
intermediate terrain, a mediator, a space-time of permanent passage between mortal and
immortal" (71).

Irigaray re-finds the Diotima of fecund inspiration, only to lose her once again. This time
Diotima places the stake of love beyond the self, not simply in the sense of the childproduct,
but rather in terms of the (related) quest for immortality through fame or reknown. While
such goals might indeed be sought in the begetting of children, Diotima notes that a superior
path leads to the begetting of children of the soul, the spiritual progeny of wisdom and virtue:
"Those whose creative instinct is physical have recourse to women, and show their love in this
way, believing that by begetting children they can secure for themselves an immortal and
blessed memory hereafter for ever; but there are some whose creative desire is of the soul,
and who long to beget spiritually, not physically, the progeny which it is the nature of the soul
to create and bring to birth. If you ask what that progeny is, it is wisdom and virtue in
general.... Everyone would prefer children such as these to children after the flesh" (208-209,
90-91).54 Demonic love dissolves under the weight of an immortality to be conferred. No
longer a becoming, but now an end. Love serves as servant to the master of immortal
reknown. The ephemeral nature of being must at all costs be denied, kept at bay by the
promise of life eternal. Irigaray laments this passing:
What seemed to me most original in Diotima's method has disappeared once again. That
irreducible intermediary milieu of love is cancelled between 'subject' (an inadequate word in
Plato) and 'beloved reality.' Amorous becoming no longer constitutes a becoming of the lover
himself, of love in the (male or female) lover, between the lovers [un devenir de l'amant
luimLme, de l'amour en l'amante(e), entre amants]. Instead it is now a Ideological quest for
what is deemed the highest reality and often situated in a transcendence inaccessible to our
condition as mortals. Immortality is put off until death and is not counted as one of our
constant tasks as mortals, as a transmutation that is endlessly incumbent on us here and now,
as a possibility inscribed in a body capable of divine becoming. Beauty of body and beauty of
soul become hierarchized, and the love of women becomes the lot of those who, incapable of
being creators in soul, are fecund in body and seek the immortality of their name perpetuated
by their offspring. (72)

What is interesting here is that this part of Diotima's speech that has often been the (exclusive)
focus of many feminist readings.55 This Diotima, the woman who elevates the spiritual love
and begetting of men over the physical love that women inspire, is often portrayed as Plato's
(or Socrates') mouthpiece, and there is, indeed considerable debate as to what "her" motives
in this passage really are.56 For Irigaray, though, this passage is only one of many. Certainly it
provides cause for feminist concern, but Irigaray's manner of reading is to read this passage
alongside those others that we have already seen. To be sure, Irigaray laments the
disappearance of Diotima's original method. She mourns the reduction of love to a teleological
quest. She is critical of the hierarchy that displaces love's intermediary sense. The demonic
function of love dies in the face of an intention and teleology of the human will. Love, she
notes, now becomes:

political wisdom, wisdom in regulating the city, not the intermediary state that inhabits lovers
and transports them from the condition of mortals to that of immortals. Love becomes a sort
of raison d'état. Love founds a family, takes care of children, including the children which
citizens are. The more its objective is distanced from an individual becoming, the more
valuable it is. Its stake is lost in immortal good and beauty as collective goods. The family is
preferable to the generation of lovers, between lovers. Adopted children are preferable to
others. This, moreover, is how it comes to pass that love between men is superior to love
between man and woman. Carnal procreation is suspended in favor of the engendering of
beautiful and good things. Immortal things. That, surprisingly, is the view of Diotima. At least
as translated through the words uttered by Socrates. (73, emphases in orginal)"

Diotima uses love as a means. But Irigaray does not dwell on this moment. She does not use it
to define the entirety of Diotima's teachings on love. She does not reduce the complexity of
Diotima's thought to this instance. While she regrets what Diotima has done, she goes back to
restate the strength of Diotima's early method and in doing so points to the ambivalence of
Diotima's speech, an ambivalence she refuses to erase with the demand of a certain logical
thought. It is because Irigaray is able to suspend these contradictory moments within Diotima's
discourse that she is able to offer us an open reading, one that refuses to totalize its encounter
with the other. Irigraray's reading remains-up until the very last sentence-a readiness to re-
read. Indeed, she notes that were she to return to Diotima' s speech with the question of
beauty to the fore, that an entirely different voice may well emerge. It is possible, she says,
that Diotima's understanding of beauty might ultimately work to confuse the opposition
between immanence and transcendence-that, like love, beauty, too, might move as
intermediary between the sensible and transcendental.

Unless what she proposes to contemplate, beauty itself, is understood as that which confuses
the opposition between immanence and transcendence. An already always sensible horizon at
the depths of which everything would appear. But it would be necessary to go back over the
whole speech again to discover it in its enchantment. (76)

The ambivalent and open-ended conclusion that Irigaray proffers suggests her readiness to
challenge her own assumptions, her readiness to move on from the fixed terrain of her own
thought.58 In this, Irigaray's reading is a kind of love or beauty in action, it is an intermediary
that moves constantly between the opposed poles of Diotima's speech. Irigraray's reading
does the work of bringing into communication the seemingly severed realms of Diotima's
possibility. The sensible and the transcendental are no longer alternatives, but meet here in
the midst of Irigaray's response.59 The coda to Irigaray's response introduces an uncertainty to
her reading allowing it to become an intermediary between her celebration and criticism of
Diotima's speech. Diotima is thus transformed from destination into the "already sensible
horizon" that Irigaray's reading arcs toward.

Irigaray has offered us what we might think of as an ethical reading of Diotima's speech;60 an
open and open-ended encounter that leaves much still to be said. There is no reduction of
Diotima to pre-conceived accounts. No attempt to complete her discourse, to have it finished
once and for all. And yet, in the process of this encounter we learn what are arguably
important lessons. We learn about a philosophy-thought through the image of love-that moves
us beyond the attitude of appropriation toward that of encounter.61 Irigaray's reading is
indeed a reading of Diotima on love, but it is at the same time also a lesson in what philosophy
and philosophers might be or become. To put this another way, we might say that Irigaray's
readers-touched by this experience of love-instantiate or incorporate alternative philosophical
responses, ones characterized by a preparedness to read and read again.62

University of Queensland, Queensland 4072, Australia

An Ethics of Reading: Adorno, Levinas, and Irigaray. Contributors: Michelle Boulous Walker -
author. Journal Title: Philosophy Today. Volume: 50. Issue: 2. Publication Year: 2006. Page
Number: 223+. © 2006 DePaul University. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved